Brilliant Edge essay; insights to tackle the inevitable creative destruction and more.
And there is a disturbing sense in which I feel like that's the world we're entering. I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that's such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it does become a problem.
Another example that is quite astonishing, one that will be recognized by future historians as an extraordinary phenomenon in the 21st century, is that the aging populations are buying into their own impoverishment. There's this strange way in which people who are older tend to be conservative, and what conservative means now is no government: "Don't you dare support my dialysis, don't you dare support my nursing home expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options."
Just to recap where the argument is so far, I've described two ways to cope with machines getting good.
One is a Marxist way, where you have some form of socialism, some institutional attempt for everybody to get along and use politics to arrange for their own liberty instead of some more abstract mechanism like money, and I'm concerned that that's not realistic given human nature.
A second way is for people to just suffer, and for the poor to wither away through attrition, as they can't afford medicine or some scenario like that over time. I should say that this notion of the poor withering away does seem to be normative right now, and it concerns me a great deal.
I believe there is a third way, which is a better way, and it happens to have also been the initial idea for the Internet, interestingly enough. My poster boy for expressing this is Ted Nelson, the eccentric character who initially proposed the Web, or something like it ... it wasn't called the Web then ... as early as 1960, which is over a half century ago, amazingly, when I was born.
Ted's idea was that there would be a universal market place where people could buy and sell bits from each other, where information would be paid for, and then you'd have a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet, thereby solving this problem of how to have a middle class, and how to have liberty. To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.
And there is a disturbing sense in which I feel like that's the world we're entering. I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that's such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it does become a problem.
Another example that is quite astonishing, one that will be recognized by future historians as an extraordinary phenomenon in the 21st century, is that the aging populations are buying into their own impoverishment. There's this strange way in which people who are older tend to be conservative, and what conservative means now is no government: "Don't you dare support my dialysis, don't you dare support my nursing home expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options."
Just to recap where the argument is so far, I've described two ways to cope with machines getting good.
One is a Marxist way, where you have some form of socialism, some institutional attempt for everybody to get along and use politics to arrange for their own liberty instead of some more abstract mechanism like money, and I'm concerned that that's not realistic given human nature.
A second way is for people to just suffer, and for the poor to wither away through attrition, as they can't afford medicine or some scenario like that over time. I should say that this notion of the poor withering away does seem to be normative right now, and it concerns me a great deal.
I believe there is a third way, which is a better way, and it happens to have also been the initial idea for the Internet, interestingly enough. My poster boy for expressing this is Ted Nelson, the eccentric character who initially proposed the Web, or something like it ... it wasn't called the Web then ... as early as 1960, which is over a half century ago, amazingly, when I was born.
Ted's idea was that there would be a universal market place where people could buy and sell bits from each other, where information would be paid for, and then you'd have a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet, thereby solving this problem of how to have a middle class, and how to have liberty. To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.
No comments:
Post a Comment